Illinois Office of
Undergraduate Research

The Dolezal lab studies how bee physiology and behavior are affected by the stressors they encounter in their environment, namely pathogens, pesticides, and nutritional deprivation. By taking an integrative approach, we can study how these factors interact with each other at the landscape, colony, and individual scale. We mostly focus on honey bees, but also are interested in studying how these factors affect other pollinators.

Undergraduates in the lab work on a variety of projects, but most work on experiments studying how pathogens, pesticides, or nutrition affect honey bee or wild bee health and resilience. This can include work on live animals (bees) performing bioassays and behavioral observation experiments, as well as work identifying and cataloging specimens for analysis. Students often also perform laboratory tasks such as DNA/RNA extractions, quantitative PCR, etc.

By joining our lab, the selected student will gain lab gain skills in teamwork, organization, the scientific method, and data analysis. You will also learn about insect/bee biology and how bees operate in modern agricultural and conservation contexts and will gain skills in insect bioassays and laboratory methods used to study bee behavior, physiology, and pathology.

Economic inequality is a pervasive, problematic, and ever-expanding aspect of societies across the globe. For example, in the United States men make more money than women, and white Americans have more wealth than Black Americans. Despite the prevalence of inequality, people disagree in its scope and size. These disagreements generate tension and undermine the development of interventions that would ameliorate financial disparities. Why do people fail to see eye-to-eye in their understanding of how large economic inequality is? In the Political Ideology and Groups lab we broadly explore how people's political beliefs (e.g., how liberal or conservative they are) correspond to their understanding of the world. In one current research project we are examining whether people's political beliefs help explain how large (or small) they view economic inequality as being. We also investigate how the perceived magnitude of economic inequality varies across social groups (e.g., race, class, religion) and countries.

Students who join the project will learn basic aspects of how to conduct research, including the development of research questions and hypotheses, submitting IRB (ethics) applications, programming surveys (e.g., using Qualtrics), using online data-collection platforms, analyzing data (e.g., using R), and presenting research findings. Students might also assist with other common aspects of research, including literature reviews and coding of participant responses. This project is best suited for students interested in topics including fairness, justice, and politics. Overall, assisting in this project will provide students with a solid foundation for conducting behavioral science research.

The Golecki Group works at the intersection of humans and materials in education, medical devices, and robotics. This includes increasing the accessibility of robotics to more future engineers by leveraging engineering education research methods and soft robotics. We also develop soft robotic assistive devices and microscale surgical tools through technical design work. We are seeking undergraduate student researchers to assist on one of three projects: a robotics education project, a microscale surgical tool project, or an active wheelchair seat cushion project. While the field of medical device design has made tremendous progress in recent decades, medical devices continue to be plagued by the body’s immune response. To advance the use of soft robotics in medical devices, new materials that address both mechanical and chemical environments need to be explored. We hypothesize that biomaterial soft robotic actuators hold promise for medical devices and surgical tools by matching moduli surrounding tissues and providing physiologically relevant chemical cues. Similarly, to develop the next generation of medical devices and soft robots for a variety of user needs, we need diverse perspectives from the engineers, scientists, and designers working in this field. As we develop new strategies for medical device design, our group also studies how students decide to work in specific technical disciplines using quantitative and qualitative research methods. Leveraging these mixed methods techniques we seek to understand and diversify the field of robotics across the continuum of education. Altogether, Dr. Golecki’s materials-based approach to soft robotics enables new biocompatible tools and new initiatives to inspire the next generation of innovators.

By joining our group, the selected student will gain skills in teamwork, organization, fabrication techniques, data analysis, and technical communication. We work with a diverse team across engineering, science, and design to realize innovative solutions in this area. Many of the students who have worked with our team have co-authored peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national conferences. We look forward to supporting an enthusiastic undergraduate student in our group through this program.

Violence is public health crisis and a leading cause of death among youth. However, a growing body of scholarship has highlighted research and evidence-based practices that demonstrate violence can be prevented. The Violence Prevention Research Lab studies the development and prevention of violence, including dating violence and intimate partner violence, bullying, cyber-victimization, stalking, sexual violence, and other forms of violence during adolescence and young adulthood. My research studies are: 1) working with state agencies to examine violence prevention programs and policies across Illinois; 2) evaluating the impact of domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs; and 3) developing an app capability to better support survivors of gender-based violence.

A student can be involved in one or all three of the ongoing projects. They may be asked to review policies in Illinois that address violence prevention (e.g., school bullying or teen dating violence prevention policies), assist with data analysis of focus group, interview, and survey data of domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs, or participate in discussions with an interdisciplinary team of scholars developing an app capability. The student will learn skills in leading literature reviews, conducting descriptive and inferential statistics, and writing reports for state agencies and community-based organizations.

For many of us, a large portion of our days is spent working. The average person will spend about one-third of their life at work, making work a critical determinant of health and well-being. With over 20 million people employed in the healthcare sector in the United States, the pandemic has underscored the importance of work-related stress and its effects. Our research team is currently working on a project that explores the impact of social and environmental factors on the mental health, substance use, and suicidality of healthcare workers, particularly those in lower-wage occupations who often have fewer resources and supports. Using a public health lens, our team will investigate the role of workplace programs, policies, and practices in either mitigating or exacerbating these challenges, aiming to identify ways to create safer and healthier work environments. This project is well-aligned with students who have interests in public health, epidemiology, and the social and behavioral sciences.

Our team welcomes, values, and accommodates diversity, including that of people with experience with mental illness and substance use. Students on our research team will get exposure to various aspects of the research life cycle: idea generation, conducting literature reviews, addressing ethical issues related to working with human research participants, recruiting participants, collecting and managing data, and disseminating findings. Many of the students who have worked with our team have co-authored peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national conferences. Students working with our team can expect to engage in quantitative research, get experience working with a multidisciplinary team, and develop an understanding of public health (i.e., the science and art of population-level disease prevention and health promotion).

Union Carbide, a corporation that produced everything from pesticide, to Energizer batteries, to 'Glad' trash bags, became a global conglomerate and household name over the course of the 20th century. Their midcentury advertisement campaigns equated the impacts of their products and innovations with that of the hand of God, depicted as visually descending from the sky to distribute vital metals, chemicals, and medicines to diverse communities across the world. In truth, the company's expansive production/consumption networks did unite discontiguous space in a God-like way. Two such places were Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh (India) and Danbury, Connecticut (USA). This contemporary archaeology project considers the entangled realities of these two locations by documenting the proliferation of development in both places in the early 1980s, the subsequent ruination of both places following the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and the reuse of ruined landscapes in both places today. Through this example, this research considers how modern peoples and places that remain entirely unknown to one another are coconstituted and codefined. If a student becomes a mentee for this project, they will assist in the creation of GIS maps of both Bhopal and Danbury that illustrate pre- and post- 1984 built landscapes. To create these maps, I will provide students with practical training in using relevant software. I will also give them access to archival documents and photographs collected in the field during the last two summers. A student mentee may also assist in following up with community contacts and conducting virtual oral history interviews.

Teaching college students is not the same as teaching high school or elementary students. There are so many things that come into consideration when trying to improve the educational experience of college students, whether that is the content, the way information is shared, how instructors relate to their students, and much more. My research has focused on the idea that you have to be C.R.A.Z.Y. to be a successful and impactful business educator. C – Care for your students. R – have Real world examples to bring the topic to the students. A – Actual experience in the area one is teaching. Z – have Zeal in your teaching to improve the experience. Y – You (the educator) can make all the difference in a student's educational journey. This project is focused on finding the most impactful ways that instructors can improve their students educational experience via their face to face teaching.

The research that the student will be taking part in will help collect and analyze data and previous research in the area of effective business and marketing education. This means the main areas of their participation will be 1. Reviewing previous literature in the area. 2. Doing field research and collecting data with myself via surveys and interviews. 3. Adding student insight into the exploratory research part of this project.

The student will gain skills in literature research, developing surveys, conducting interviews, and having a good grasp of what an academic research project entails. They will also have a better idea on how they could educate others if they were to go into the academic field.

Sense of belonging is a critical human need and powerful motivator. Individuals who struggle feeling a sense of belonging to a specific context are more susceptible to experiencing mental health and physical health issues. College students who struggle feeling a sense of belonging to their university context are no exception and can also experience lower academic performance and even drop out of college. Our lab focuses on how sense of belonging is experienced by different minoritized populations (first-generation college students, racially/ethnically minoritized groups, etc.) and how it impacts important life outcomes. We also examine how sense of belonging contributes to mental and physical health disparities among minoritized populations. Our research lab is currently working on a project that explores the impact of university belonging on sleep, mental and physical health outcomes among diverse college students (racial/ethnic minoritized students, first-generation, commuter, etc.) and how this impact changes over a students' time in college. We use different sources of data (daily diary self-report, actigraphy, biomarker) to explore our research questions.

Students in our lab will gain knowledge of how an academic research project progresses from study design to publication and be exposed to faculty and graduate students that can serve as future letters of recommendation/mentors. Students that work on this project will also learn valuable research skills (e.g., analyzing quantitative and qualitative data), strengthen their familiarity with important psychological topics pertaining to minoritized populations (e.g., racial and ethnic mental and physical health disparities), and gain experience in a research lab that is committed to social justice, employs diverse perspectives, and is focused on equity and opportunities for growth for all research team members and collaborators.